


Straight-Edge; Or, How Patrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bong

by thingswithwings



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Adventures, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Marijuana, Recreational Drug Use, Rimming, Stoned Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2019-11-29
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:54:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21608602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithwings/pseuds/thingswithwings
Summary: Patrick wondered if getting high helped David and Stevie talk things through with each other. Open up. Stuff like that.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer & Stevie Budd, Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Comments: 125
Kudos: 734





	Straight-Edge; Or, How Patrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bong

**Author's Note:**

> Content note for people having sex while high. It's intentional and the characters 100% see it as consensual and safe.
> 
> Very many thanks to etben, whose thoughtful beta analysis of this fic helped me to see more in it and make it much better.

Patrick never really liked pot. In high school, plenty of guys on his baseball team used to do it, and Helen, who was on Student Council with him, got high sometimes after school, and the kids Patrick used to play Magic: The Gathering with at the local toys and games store smoked up all the time, before the local toys and games store went under and Patrick kind of lost half of his friends and got stuck with a large financial investment in paper cards with monsters printed on them. 

There were lots of opportunities, was the thing, and he tried it a few times, but it never made him feel good, the way it seemed to make everyone else feel good. It made him feel antsy, and paranoid, and full of too much energy, while everyone else seemed to want to lie on the floor of their parents’ basements and eat cheese slices.

Helen said that some people were like that, it didn’t work the same way on them, and not to stress out about it. 

“Makes sense,” she said, standing with him behind the gym and blowing out a cloud of skunk-smelling smoke. “You’re kind of uptight.”

“I’m not uptight,” Patrick said, offended, because he worked on his image all the time so that people wouldn’t think he was uptight. He played sports, he joked around, he made sure to get As but also not to tell his friends he got As if he could at all avoid it. He was friendly with everyone, even if he didn’t have a lot of close friends. “I don’t know where you’re getting that from.”

Helen just laughed, which was annoying. 

He tried it again in university, because Brent MacDonald offered it to him and, in retrospect, Patrick’s pretty clear on the fact that he had a massive crush on Brent MacDonald. But it didn’t make him feel good that time, either, at Brent’s party: all the nervousness he’d come in the door with got amplified, and he started analyzing and overanalyzing what everyone was saying to him, lost and caught in trying to interpret their meanings and say the right things. His eyes felt dry and his body felt weird and he had to leave, to run back to his dorm room, to huddle on his bed and worry about what he’d do if someone broke in through the window to try to steal his computer. 

Rachel had smoked, sometimes, when they were younger, but by the time they were engaged and living together she’d given it up. 

“You can’t, and it wouldn’t be much fun without you anyway,” she said, which he thought was really nice of her, but which also made him feel like he was defective, a drag, _uptight_. He didn’t know how to tell her that, though, and it became one of the little silences he carried inside of him, the little silences they had within what seemed like their close, laughing, tell-each-other-everything relationship. 

It was easier not to make a big deal about it, Patrick told himself. He told himself that about a lot of things, back then.

After he moved to Schitt’s Creek, after he met David, after . . . after everything, their first kiss, their first few dates, their first night together at Stevie’s, he thought about it now and then, because David talked a lot, and really casually, about what sounded like pretty hardcore party drugs. It worried Patrick a little, but despite the jokes it seemed like David’s days of benzos and ketamine were behind him. Patrick didn’t know how he would have dealt with it, otherwise, if David had wanted to get high on that kind of stuff around him. If David had wanted him to try them, too. But the most they had together was a glass or two of beer or wine, and Patrick figured that was good: they were still taking it kind of slow, and it was good to stay in control. God knew Patrick felt out of control often enough, around David, with this new part of himself unlocked; he’d hang on to what little he had.

And it wasn’t like they had a lot of private time together, anyway; since they’d started having sex, only a few weeks before, Patrick wanted to use that private time exclusively for having _more_ sex. Sex with David was amazing, revelatory, overwhelming sometimes, and Patrick craved it all the time. David seemed to crave it too, from the way he acted, the noises he made, the way he lit up whenever they had a little space to themselves. Ultimately, the two of them were just horny and desperate and sneaking around a lot, so when Patrick got the news, one night, that Ray was going to be out of town for the evening, he raced to the motel, breathless and already turned on, only to eventually locate David and Stevie in one of the empty rooms, surrounded by a lot of pot smoke. 

“Patrick!” David exclaimed, upon opening the door. “Stevie, it’s _Patrick_, Patrick you look so good, oh my God. What are you doing here?”

Patrick, who had been ready to grab David by the wrist, throw him into the car, and drive hell for leather back to Ray’s house, was a little put out. He rubbed his hands on his jeans and told his dick to stop getting excited.

“You weren’t replying to my texts,” Patrick said. David waved him in, his gestures even bigger and more swirly than usual, and Patrick reluctantly took a couple steps in to let the door close behind him.

“Stevie and I were just gonna make _popcorn_,” David said, in a hushed, reverent tone. 

“So, I can see you’re busy,” Patrick started to say, but then Stevie interrupted him, holding up a bong. 

“Want in, Paaaaaatrick?” she asked, elongating his name and clicking the k sound at the end. “It’s the good stuff, I got it from my dirtbag cousin. He is a _dirtbag_. But! On the other hand! He has good weed.”

“It does make him more tolerable as a person,” David mused. “Negative five hundred and twelve rather than negative . . . five hundred and . . . thirteen.” He looked very proud of himself for doing this math.

Someone on the TV screamed loudly; Patrick glanced at it. It was one of those movies on the Space channel with the giant octopuses or sharks or snakes or whatever.

“No, thanks,” Patrick said. “I was just―gonna go.”

David took him by the shoulders and stared into his eyes, deeply, which was not something that David usually . . . ever . . . did. David was bitten-off smiles and hesitant glances and closing his eyes when he got too emotional; this didn’t feel like him. 

“Patrick. You didn’t say why you came over in the first place.”

Patrick had kind of forgotten how annoying it was to be around stoned people while being entirely sober yourself. It was all like this, like David looking into his eyes, like David’s grip strong on his arms instead of his usual fluttering fingertip-touches. Stoned people did things they wouldn’t normally do. And they were unpredictable. Anything could happen. It was annoying.

“I―Ray’s out of town, so I thought―but―”

“That is _amazing_ news,” David breathed, coming in a little closer, lips parting. His lips looked really inviting. “Let me find my shoes.” He started by looking under the bed, even though they were over by the door.

“No―David. No. We’re not―” he glanced over nervously at Stevie, and dropped his voice lower. “We’re not _going to Ray’s_ when you’re high.”

“Unnnggghhh,” David groaned, shoulders sagging as he stood back up. “Stoned sex is the best, though.”

“It really is,” Stevie agreed, thoughtfully eating some Smarties she had produced from somewhere, crunching loudly through the candy and chocolate. “Some of the best sex David and I ever had was while we were high.” 

Patrick rubbed a hand over his hot face.

“Okay, well, too bad. It’s a, a consent. Thing,” Patrick said, kind of sharply, and David sat down on the bed with a little huff of a sigh. 

“If you got high with me, then it would be consensual,” David said.

“I’m not gonna―that’s not how that works, and also, no. Pot doesn’t really work on me.”

Stevie’s jaw dropped open, chocolate visible on her tongue. “That is the saddest fuckin thing I’ve ever heard.”

“So,” Patrick said, gathering the tattered remnants of his concentration around himself, “I will leave you two to make popcorn and have fun.” He bent down to kiss David, just a goodbye kiss, peck on the lips, but David surged up into it, all eager and sloppy, and _Jesus_, they haven’t had sex in _four days_, why couldn’t Ray have told him earlier that he was going out of town?

“Stevie and I won’t have sex, though,” David said, as Patrick forced himself to pull away. “I promise.”

“That’s nice to know,” Patrick said. “I wasn’t worried about that.”

It took some effort and a lot more kisses from David that only got Patrick all riled up again, but eventually he escaped, and drove himself back home, and jerked off kind of angrily.

*

“You’re not mad, are you?” David asked him, the next day. “Because of me and Stevie being high when you showed up?” 

“I’m not mad,” Patrick said. He had kind of been mad, but more at the situation, or at . . . at himself, maybe. He wasn’t sure. Thinking about it made him start to feel mad again, so he pushed it away. “Just disappointed.”

“Isn’t that what moms say on TV?” David asked, suppressing a smile in the normal way he suppressed his smiles, the way Patrick had come to recognize, to like.

“Disappointed that we couldn’t fuck last night,” Patrick added, raising an eyebrow at him, a little breathless at his own daring. That got David’s attention, got him leaning over the store counter towards him. David, Patrick thought, kind of . . . liked to talk. About sex. It wasn’t surprising, given how vocal he was otherwise, but it made Patrick feel a little nervous, a little hot.

“Yeah?” David asked, light in his eyes. “What was it you wanted to do, exactly?”

Patrick’s breath caught in his throat and his tongue felt heavy. So many images flashed through his mind, desires, fantasies, things he didn’t even know the names for, things he didn’t know if he wanted or not. Things he’d seen in porn but didn’t know if they could do in real life. The half-dozen times they’d had sex, they’d been slow with each other, or maybe David had been slow with him, hands or mouths or just rubbing their bodies together. He’d asked Patrick if it was good, he’d told Patrick he was amazing, but Patrick could sense that maybe he was holding back. 

Patrick would have been annoyed at the thought that David didn’t want to scare him off with gay butt stuff or dirty talk or whatever, except it was overshadowed by how annoyed Patrick was at himself for being a little scared of the gay butt stuff and the dirty talk and all the unknown _whatevers_.

“I―” he started, uncertain what his next words were going to be.

The bell over the door rang, and a customer walked in.

“We’ll have to come back to _that_ conversation,” David said, no longer suppressing his smile.

Patrick blew out a breath.

They didn’t come back to that conversation, though, and that was okay. Over time, they started doing more kinds of sex stuff, gradually and carefully, and Patrick liked it, and he felt good about it, and that was okay too. David never pushed him, even though Patrick mostly let David set the pace, and the things they did together felt incredible. Patrick wanted David, and he had him, and that all on its own was incredible.

*

After that, he took it in stride that David and Stevie were sometimes going to hang out and get high and watch terrible movies, that it was their friend time to chill out together. It wasn’t a big deal to him, once David got better about communicating with him, so Patrick didn’t try to make plans overtop of David and Stevie’s Getting Stoned plans. They didn’t do it all the time, but Patrick did notice that they tended to do it when things were stressful at the store or at the motel, or when Stevie’s family was being awful or when David’s family was being too much. So they got high after all the stuff about Mrs Rose being dead on the internet, and after Jocelyn’s baby shower, and when they were both recovering from poison oak. Looking back on it, Patrick was wincingly sure that they smoked up together at the spa after Rachel showed up in town, during those terrible weeks when Patrick was so afraid that David was going to break up with him. 

Patrick wondered if getting high helped them talk things through with each other. Open up. Stuff like that.

But he and David did fine, he thought; they said _I love you_ to each other on a warm autumn morning, and they got to have much more regular sex after Ray started dating a guy in Elmdale, and it was good. They were good, together. Patrick didn’t always have the words to say what he wanted in bed, and sometimes even if he had them, they got stuck in his throat, struggling to break the silence, but still. 

Still. David was teaching him, he thought, to ask for more.

*

“How was your marijuana outing with Stevie last night?” Patrick asks David one bright shivering winter morning when he waltzes into the store at 10:30. David laughs. 

“Delightful,” he says, sighing. He comes over to Patrick and kisses him hello. “I know it’s not your thing, but you’re sweet not to mind.”

“I don’t begrudge you spending time with your friend, David,” Patrick says, brow furrowing. 

“Yeah, but―I don’t know, I guess you’re so straight-edge I sometimes worry that you disapprove.”

“I don’t disapprove,” Patrick says. He thinks about that word, _straight-edge_; he’s heard it applied to himself before. Straight-edge, like straight, like he used to think he was: conforming to rigid parameters. He wants to be the kind of person who would grin and say, _hey, there’s nothing straight about me,_ but he knows that he isn’t. “I told you, it just doesn’t work on me.”

“Right,” David nods. “Well, it’s still nice of you to give me and Stevie that time.” He kisses Patrick again, and Patrick kisses him back. David looks amazing today, stubble on his chin and eyelashes dark against his cheeks, which are pale from the cold outside. Patrick loves him.

They go to work, David on some event planning for their winter poetry series and Patrick on some new grant applications, taking turns to stop and help the occasional customer. 

Patrick keeps thinking about it, about that word. _Straight-edge._ He thinks about Brent MacDonald, and how nervous he’d been to go to that party, to see him, to talk to him. He thinks about Rachel, and how she’d given up that experience for his sake. He thinks about wanting, the lonely, isolating experience of wanting, and not being able to ask.

“Hey David,” Patrick says, into the quiet, against the background of the soft instrumental music piping through the store. David hums acknowledgement, and Patrick asks: “What do you get out of it?” David looks up at him, curious. “Getting stoned. Is it just the, like, letting go, release of inhibitions, or―?”

David turns to face him fully, eyebrows raised. “Yeah, I guess,” he says, slowly. “I mean. You can use drugs to, like, get away from things, or you can use them to . . . experience things. With Stevie, it’s usually more like experiencing things. Having fun. Feeling good.”

Patrick nods, licking his lips. David has never talked about it in terms of addiction or abuse, but it’s clear from things he’s said that he used to predominantly use drugs in the first way. Patrick’s glad it’s just weed, now, and just for fun.

“Why do you want to know?” David asks, pulling Patrick out of his thoughts.

“I dunno.” Patrick sits on the feeling for a long moment, then speaks it. “I’m a little jealous, I guess.”

“Hm.” David glances down at his sketchbook, which has a thorough and precise diagram of his plan for the winter window displays. His hand is neat, the lines clean and confident, with everything labeled clearly. Patrick adores David’s diagrams. “We could try to get you that experience, if you want it.”

“Pot doesn’t―”

“Work on you, I heard. What varieties have you tried?”

Patrick blinks. “The varieties . . . that . . . people gave me?” he replies.

“Mm-hm. High school kids? University kids?” At Patrick’s nod, he puts down his pencil. “And when you say it doesn’t work, do you mean you felt nothing?”

Patrick licks his lips, looking at his laptop for a minute, for strength. He’s stopped halfway through writing this grant application, a sentence suspended midway. _Our unique atmosphere and dedicated support of local businesses_ blinks up at him from the screen, and Patrick can’t remember what verb he was going to use there.

“I get paranoid. I feel weird. Like, hyperaware.”

David nods, taking this in. “So, it might not be for you. That’s a thing. That’s okay. But if you want, we could try scoring, just, the gentlest, mellowest, low-paranoia pot in the land for you, and see what happens.”

Hesitating, Patrick looks at the grant application again. He feels reluctance, though he doesn’t know why, really. Nothing truly terrible could happen. It’s not like David would let him get hurt, or make fun of him, or do anything bad to him, while he was vulnerable like that.

“I guess I could,” he says. 

“To be clear?” David says, taking on the same tone Patrick’s mostly heard him use to talk about blowjobs and anal sex, “you don’t have to. You can just read a book once a month while Stevie and I get high and watch monster movies with questionably sexualized death scenes.”

A minute ticks by while Patrick thinks it through, bringing himself to a decision. “Let’s try it,” he says, eventually, even though he still doesn’t feel sure. But he’s glad to have said yes anyway; saying yes to this feels a little like saying yes the first time David rimmed him, or the first time he sucked David’s cock, something scary and interesting and his, his choice to make purely out of desire, and not out of expectation.

David was the one who made him feel that way the first time, that he had a choice, that he could have the things he wanted. Patrick wants to get better at taking them.

*

It’s a couple weeks later when David makes the offer again, this time with the gentle, mellow, low-paranoia weed in hand. 

“Yeah, okay,” Patrick says, but he feels weird about it, squishy and unsure inside, like his body still doesn’t know what the right decision is.

“Yeah? Because honestly Stevie and I are happy to bogart . . . all of this, if you don’t want any. You really don’t have to like, prove anything.”

Taking a deep breath, Patrick shakes his head. “Don’t bogart it. I want to, um. Experience things.”

He hopes that’s true. He thinks it is.

David smiles, and kisses his cheek, and goes to find his lighter.

They meet up with Stevie and the three of them get high at her apartment. David goes first, demonstrating the bong technique, then blowing a stream of smoke from his soft, pursed lips.

Patrick takes the bong from him and takes a hit, nervous but determined. Right away he feels the difference from his earlier encounters with cheap student weed: the smoothness of the smoke in his lungs, the speed of it moving through his body, the immediate and powerful sensation of his brain shifting gears.

“Wow,” he says, a minute later. Stevie takes the bong from his limp hands.

“How you doin, honey?” David asks him. David’s only called him honey a couple of times before; usually after sex, or when he was half-asleep; when his defenses were down. Patrick thinks again about how drugs make people do things they ordinarily wouldn’t do, and this time he’s glad for it, glad if it lets David call him . . . that. What he maybe wants to call him.

It occurs to him for the first time that David’s being vulnerable, too, doing this with him. That they’ll be vulnerable together.

His head feels fuzzy.

“My head feels fuzzy,” he says, while Stevie inhales so deeply and for so long that he feels like her lungs must be about to explode. Patrick thinks about it, about Stevie’s lungs exploding, which makes him think about other things exploding, like Stevie’s ancient water heater or the leaky pipes at the store, which makes him think about Stevie or David getting hurt when something explodes, which makes him think about having to take one of them to the hospital and having to calm the other one down at the same time, which―

“Fuzzy is nice,” David says, and reaches for his hand. David’s touch startles him, and he jumps, but then he relaxes into it, the nice feeling of his boyfriend holding his hand.

His thoughts settle, focus, fixate: David holding his hand, David’s thumb on his knuckles, David’s warmth, David’s soft skin. 

“Take a breath,” Stevie says, voice squeaky as she tries to hold her own breath in. Patrick laughs, weird and a little loud to his own ears. Is he too loud? Is he too high? Will Stevie laugh at him?

Stevie does laugh, a shock of smoke emerging from her mouth as she does it, then sets the bong down on the floor between her and David. “You need me to hold your other hand?” she asks, like a joke. Patrick, mind spinning, holds his hand out to her and grins.

She takes it, calling his bluff, then grabs David’s hand.

“We should have a _seance_,” she exclaims, eyes bright.

“No, no no no, no we should not,” David says, shaking his head emphatically along with his stream of no’s. 

Patrick laughs, not so tight this time, not so weird, not so loud, comfortable in the well-worn rhythm of teasing David with Stevie. “Aw, c’mon, David, it’ll be fun. I bet we’ll hardly raise any murderous ghosts at all.”

“You say that like it’s funny, but it is definitely not funny,” David says, yanking his hands back from both Stevie and Patrick, grabbing the bong instead and firing it up again. After a minute, Patrick realizes that this means he’s just holding hands with Stevie. 

His brain starts fixating on the places where his hand is touching Stevie’s hand; on the sweatiness of his palm; on the roughness of her fingertips; on whether it’s okay to be doing that, or whether he should feel uncomfortable about it; on whether he should say something, make a joke, whether Stevie is going to think it’s weird, or David’s going to think it’s weird, or―

“What’re you thinking about, Patrick?” Stevie says, squeezing firmly, her hand confident on his. 

Patrick remembers: Stevie’s his friend. They text each other funny gifs and complain about David and love David and sing along to tracks from musicals in the store when David’s not there to shoot them dirty looks. Stevie’s got a beautiful voice and she says her favourite musical is _Chicago_ but it’s actually secretly _Oklahoma_ and Patrick trusts her.

“This stuff is really strong,” he says. David hands him the bong again, and he takes it smoothly but fumbles the lighter for a second before putting flame to bowl and inhaling deeply again. The bong bubbles under his hands, cheerful, restful. 

“We aren’t fucking around with that high school garbage you used to smoke,” David says, smiling. “This is grownup weed.”

“I feel very mature,” Patrick agrees, holding his breath, then letting it out with the smoke and his laughter. 

David laughs with him, and Stevie laughs too, and suddenly Patrick feels good, to be laughing with these people, all together, laughing and free together. 

He feels unpredictable, another version of himself.

While Stevie takes another hit, Patrick starts to feel restless, strange, and rather than trying to keep himself still and quiet he jumps to his feet, bouncing a little. Neither of the other two look up at him, like this is perfectly okay, like Patrick doing the thing he feels like doing is perfectly okay.

“This stuff gives such a body high,” David muses, his eyes closing. “It really is mellow.” 

Patrick never really knew what that meant before, _body high_, but he thinks he gets it now, the way his skin and his toes and his fingertips all feel so good, the way that stretching his arms and shoulders is suddenly a delightful sensation. He likes it.

The bong goes around again, David passing it up to Patrick without commenting on the fact that Patrick is still up there, stretching and moving, while the others are on the floor. After the next hit, Patrick passes the bong to Stevie again and gets lost in doing some toe-touches. His hamstrings feel _amazing_.

“Stevie,” David is saying, while Patrick rocks up and down on the balls of his feet and rolls his shoulders, “please tell me you have snacks.”

Stevie blows smoke out in a long, sexy stream, like a femme fatale in a detective movie, then smiles at David, toothy and wicked. “You know my rules. Bring it if you wanna eat it. The fridge is empty.”

David groans, falling back onto the carpet. Patrick remembers that David once refused to go barefoot on this same threadbare, faded carpet; right now, he doesn’t seem to care. His fingers fall into the pile of it and start stroking, absently, like he’s just enjoying the texture. 

“We need to get out and get snacks,” Patrick says, realizing as he bounces that it’s exactly what he wants: he wants to go outside in the cold and walk to the convenience store and buy chips and ice cream and then maybe dance the whole way home.

“Ugh, going out,” David says, but he struggles back upright. “Must we?” 

“Come on,” Patrick says, smiling now, tugging on David’s hand. “Come on, come on, let’s go.”

Stevie laughs, and jumps to her feet too, taking David’s other hand. “We’ll carry you if we have to,” she threatens. David groans and is pulled to his feet, falling all over the both of them. Patrick and Stevie are both shorter than David, and Stevie a little shorter than Patrick, which means that David collapsing down on them turns them into two little columns trying to support a much larger . . . column. Or something. Patrick doesn’t know the architecture words.

“You’re like beautiful architecture,” Patrick says, getting his shoulder under David’s armpit. David turns his face to look at him, eyes sparkling in surprise.

“God, I love you,” he says, freely and earnestly. Patrick inhales, shocked.

“Okay, okay, enough of the lovefest,” Stevie grouses, standing on tiptoe to take her share of David’s weight. Fortunately, after a few seconds, David is standing under his own power. Stevie slips out from under him, but Patrick doesn’t, and it means that David tilts up Patrick’s chin with one finger and kisses him.

Patrick is anxious about that kiss for a minute: is it weird? Is it too wet? What is kissing? What are lips? How does it work? Is Stevie watching? Is it rude to kiss in front of her? But then David’s tongue slips against his and he falls into it, the sensation of it consuming his mind. Wow. Kissing. Kissing is terrific.

Patrick’s breathing slows right down, inside that kiss.

“I said enough, jeez,” Stevie says. Patrick pulls himself away from David’s mouth. 

“Let’s get snacks,” he says, breathing hard. David buries his face against Patrick’s neck.

“_Snacks_,” he repeats, with near-religious ecstasy.

Once they’re out of the building, Patrick feels good, feels purpose: he walks fast, breathing in the cold winter air, feeling the delicious shock of it inside his lungs. He thinks he can feel his lungs, all the individual tiny branching alveoli, the way they draw oxygen from the air, the way they expand and contract, the filigree weight of them inside his body. 

“Oh god, slow down,” David calls out, laughing, behind him. It occurs to Patrick that David’s laughing at him, at least a little, laughing at the way Patrick is organized and focused and likes a mission, but it’s okay, it’s actually literally okay, for David to laugh at him like that, because David knows him, and loves him, and . . . Patrick loses his train of thought. He slows down.

There are cars parked up and down the street. Patrick thinks about what would happen if someone jumped up from behind one of the cars. How he’d react. What he’d do to protect David and Stevie. He starts fixating on that idea, examining each car carefully, looking at shadows, walking faster again, but then Stevie and David start pushing each other, behind him, scrabbling like siblings, and Patrick glances back at them fondly, just watching the scene of them in their winter coats play out before him, absorbed. 

He shakes the other, darker thoughts away, doesn’t let them stick. He takes another deep, grounding breath of the air, trying not to cough at the sharp icy quality of it inside of him.

He claps his hands twice, briskly, to break David and Stevie out of their squabble.

“Come on, team,” Patrick calls, cheerfully, and starts walking again, boots crunching on the crystallized snow underneath them. The sound of it is big in the darkness, crunch crunch crunch, delightful in his ears. He starts stomping a little, just to hear it, just to enjoy the way the sound makes his ears happy makes his lungs happy makes his heart happy. “It’s not far!”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Stevie is saying behind him, laughing. “You’re an _adventure stoner_. Oh fuck, I should’ve known.”

Patrick spins around, walking backwards, feeling utter contentment and confidence in his body, in the way he can make it move through space. “I’m what? What?”

“Adventure stoner,” David repeats. “Oh god. That’s so right. That’s it.”

“What the fuck is an adventure stoner?” Patrick asks, and he thinks he’s too loud again, too loud for the hushed snow-covered Schitt’s Creek streets, but he feels good, too, feels too good to worry about being too loud.

“You are!” Stevie says, cracking herself up. “You like going on adventures when you get high. Our glorious leader! Take us to the snacks!”

“I am,” Patrick says, a little put out and a little proud of his leadership skills. “Keep up!”

Behind him, David and Stevie crack up again.

Patrick . . . likes it. He laughs too, laughs and laughs and walks faster. 

At one point, about halfway to the convenience store, Stevie jogs up to walk beside him.

“Hey Patrick,” she says, solicitous. Patrick looks at her, already grinning, already having a good time, even before she speaks. Her mittens and toque make her look softer than usual, a little silly. 

He likes her so much. How did he not realize it before, that he likes her this much? He likes her and he has such big blooming affection for her, blooming inside his chest like a flower.

“Yeah?” he asks.

“Race you,” Stevie says, and starts running.

Patrick curses and throws himself into running, too, fast as he can, arms pumping at his sides, joy in the motion. 

It takes him a block or so to notice that Stevie didn’t come with him, that she’s still back at the starting line, bent double and laughing at how gullible he is.

“Oh, fuck you, Stevie,” he yells back, across the block, and for some reason doesn’t feel humiliated.

“Shhhhh,” David says, laughing, gasping, his shhhh louder than the words they were saying. “You’ll wake up the whole town.”

“It’s ten pm,” Patrick says, spreading his arms. “The whole town should be on an adventure, too.”

Under Patrick’s glorious leadership, they get snacks, and they get the snacks back to Stevie’s place. They eat them and laugh and Patrick feels those paranoid worried thoughts fading, fading into the amazing tastes and textures of the food, into the warm weight of Stevie’s head against his shoulder while she laugh-snorts, the warm press of David’s lips while he kisses Patrick, open and wholehearted and without guile or ironic distance, unlike himself, but also like himself, maybe, the self he wants to be.

Patrick loves it. He loves it. He loves getting high.

*

“So, it kind of seems like that . . . worked on you,” David says, the next morning, when they wake up cuddled together in Stevie’s bed. Stevie’s on David’s other side, pressed against his back, still asleep and drooling.

“Yeah,” Patrick says, taking it in, figuring it out. He felt so good, last night. He did things and said things and felt things he didn’t normally do or say or feel. “I guess so.”

“Is it the kind of thing you’d want to do again?”

Patrick thinks about David, last night, about the open sloppy sensual way he kissed, about his wandering hands, about his giggly beautiful body pressed up fully against Patrick’s. About how it had felt to stretch, or run, or crouch, how his own body gloried in exertion.

Patrick wants . . . he wants that. Again. More.

“Yeah,” Patrick says, into the gradual reluctant light of the winter dawn. “But maybe . . . just the two of us, next time?”

It would be intimate, just the two of them together. A new kind of intimacy. He can see it now, how the way they are together can be augmented, heightened, made bigger.

“You wanna try having stoned sex?” David asks, in an undertone. “I thought you said it wasn’t consensual.”

“It is if we agree that’s what we’re doing before we get high,” Patrick says, and David shrugs against him, one shoulder, the motion pressing against Patrick’s arm. Patrick, on impulse, reaches down to take David’s hand. He remembers kissing it, last night, kissing his knuckles with reverence, slowly, delightedly. 

He doesn’t know why he’s never done that before. He does it again, now, kissing each knuckle, each fingertip. He’s allowed to do this, he realizes; he can do this anytime he wants.

“Aren’t you affectionate,” David murmurs, watching him. 

“I love your hands,” Patrick says. He doesn’t know if he’s ever said that to David before. He’s wanted to.

“I love your mouth,” David says, with a soft little smile, and kisses him.

“No gooey stuff while you’re in bed with me,” Stevie objects, snorting herself half-awake. “S’rude.”

Patrick and David break apart, laughing, but they’re still holding hands. 

“Well. We’ll try getting high and making out sometime when Stevie’s not actively spooning me,” David promises, in a whisper. Patrick laughs so hard, silently, shoulders shaking, that he has to close his eyes and rest his head against David’s chest for support. Then, when he stops laughing, he stays there, cozy and comfortable, at rest.

*

The thing is, David’s always already sensual. He loves beautiful sights and scents and textures, loves rich tastes and complementary colours and the sound of a deftly-played oboe concerto. When they get high together the next time, a week later when Ray’s in Elmdale with his boyfriend, Patrick can see how that trait is amplified by the pot, can see how David looks at and tastes and touches the world around him when he no longer feels bound by rules or inhibitions. 

David, Patrick learns, wants to consume the whole world, take it on his tongue and feel its texture and absorb its taste. He’s beautiful.

“You’re beautiful,” Patrick says, watching David spread his body luxuriously on the soft flannel sheets of Patrick’s bed, fingertips sliding up and down the slick varnished wood of the headboard. He doesn’t say that enough, to David; he thinks it a lot, but he doesn’t always say it. “You’re so beautiful.”

David makes a happy little sound and rolls over to bury his face in Patrick’s neck. Patrick imagines that David is enjoying the textures and tastes and sensations of him, too, the way he does with food and fabric and smooth objects. He imagines that David is inhaling his scent and holding it on his tongue, savouring it; that when David digs his teeth into Patrick’s throat it’s to taste the heat of his rising blush; that when he feathers his fingertips against Patrick’s body he experiences it the same way Patrick does, as the hot, startling, radical spark of their skin moving together. 

“Do you like my skin?” Patrick asks, and David laughs helplessly against Patrick’s collarbone.

“That’s the creepiest thing I’ve ever heard,” he manages, eventually, which makes Patrick laugh too, laugh at himself for saying the wrong thing, and somehow their laughter just makes the moment hotter, makes him want to thrust and writhe up against David’s body, take more of these sensations, give more of them to David.

“I like your skin,” David murmurs, a minute later, kissing the notch of Patrick’s throat, dipping his tongue in. “I like how you taste, and how easily you blush.” He pulls the collar of Patrick’s shirt aside. “I like these freckles on your shoulders, Patrick.”

Patrick feels like he’s glowing, under David’s words, and when David sucks more wet kisses onto his skin he hopes that David can taste that too, the glow he feels from inside.

The process of undressing takes forever, a pleasant eternity unmoored from normal time, their hands and mouths ranging over each others’ bodies, pressure and pleasure and the warmth of touch. Patrick feels turned on, but it’s not just his heart beating and his cock getting hard; he feels like his skin is turned on, his hair, his fingernails, the jutting-out bones of his ankles. His whole body feels good, sexual, sexy, and when he touches David, wherever he touches David, he gasps.

“I wanna try something new,” Patrick tells him, a long time later, when they’re naked together, touching and kissing lazily. “I wanna do something for you.”

“Ad-ven-ture ston-er,” David says, sing-song, delighted, pressing swift kisses to Patrick’s chest. “What do you want to try? And are you sure it’s consensual?”

“You can say no,” Patrick says, concerned about it all of a sudden, concerned and spiraling, what if David doesn’t want it, what if David wouldn’t want it, what if David feels pressure to say he wants it―

“I know that,” David says, calm and clear-eyed despite the fact that time is no longer linear and they’re drifting away from gravity. “I know. I meant―for you. I’ll say it if I don’t want it, Patrick. I promise.”

“I want to lick you,” Patrick says, in a rush. “I want to put my tongue inside you. I want to eat you out.” He doesn’t know if you say _eat you out_ with guys or only with girls, but it’s what he wants, what he wants to express, the idea of fucking David with his tongue and his lips until he surrenders to the slow build of sensation. He wants to express how much he wants to bury his face in David’s ass and give him pleasure and that’s how he thinks to say it, and he can’t be anxious or upset about how he says it, because it exposes all his want and need and desire in one simple phrase.

He wants to be exposed. He wants that. He marvels at the thought: he wants it.

_I want to eat you out I want to eat you out I want to eat you out,_ the phrase echoes in his brain, a little red tinge of anxiety behind it, but David smiles at him, big and open and joyous, and the roiling concern in Patrick’s belly settles down. David’s never asked him for this, which is why they’ve never done it, but Patrick can tell he wants it. Patrick wants to give it to him. He wants to give him everything.

“I―are you sure? You haven’t, before,” David says, so careful, even when his face is expressing joy and anticipation. Patrick loves him; he loves him.

“I want to. I’ve been, been wanting to,” he says, as if it’s just that easy, as if he can say what he wants and then have it. But that’s what David’s always given him, after all. Patrick kisses him, and then rolls with him so David ends up on his stomach. He caresses David’s face, his dear face. “Is this okay?”

“Yeah, Patrick, god, yeah, it’s okay,” David says, and then spreads his legs while Patrick shuffles down the bed. He runs his hands up David’s ass, spreading his cheeks, and then doesn’t waste any more time, sinking into David’s body, sucking and kissing his hole. He tastes dark and sweaty and like a revelation, soft and sweet under Patrick’s tongue, the sounds of his gasps and the shifting of his hips spurring Patrick on, making him want to make David want to keep going. Patrick grabs the edible lube from the drawer and slicks David up.

“Patrick, Patrick, fuck,” David breathes, at Patrick’s mercy, under Patrick’s hands and mouth, and it’s all Patrick has ever wanted, this singular focus, this absence of anxiety, this complete confidence that this is where he’s meant to be, that this is what he’s meant to do. He buries his face in David’s ass and buries his fingers in the soft fat of David’s cheeks and he breathes and breathes and feels the glorious sensation of David trembling underneath him.

“I just wanna fucking live here,” Patrick admits, confesses, murmurs against David’s skin, against David’s hole and his perineum. “I wanna be nothing else but this.”

“You can, you can, you can,” David says, a lie, but Patrick knows he feels it in the moment, feels that Patrick can just shove his tongue into David’s ass forever. Patrick does. He does it; he likes it; he likes the way the sensation of David soft and grasping around him fills up his consciousness. 

Hours later, days later, eons later, David shifts suddenly, going still, and Patrick closes his eyes and runs his tongue back and forth, firm and hot over David’s rim, and waits, and wonders. Patrick didn’t mean for David to come this way, not necessarily, and maybe David didn’t either, but it turns out that’s what’s happening, David is coming: arching beautifully beneath him and exclaiming “oh, oh, oh, _Patrick_” in soft tones and shaking and coming all over the sheets beneath them. 

“Jesus,” Patrick mutters, lifting his face, watching as David turns over, wet and warm and spent, the graceful lassitude of his limbs, the elegant lines of his body. Like architecture, Patrick thinks again, wildly, kissing his way up David’s hip, over David’s belly. “David. Jesus. I can’t believe you did that. That was so beautiful, thank you, thank you. You’re so perfect.”

Now that he’s started talking, he can’t stop, and David smiles, surprised, under the praise.

“You did it to me,” David says, breathless. “You were amazing. Patrick. Wow.”

“So beautiful,” Patrick repeats, still pressing desperate kisses to his skin. “God, your body, you’re just―you just came on my tongue, you came from my tongue in your ass, you look so good, David, David.” 

David draws him up into a kiss, which Patrick only thinks to object to a minute later, but David must not mind, he supposes. He relaxes, lets himself sink into the kiss, and David’s hands come up to caress his hips and his ass and Patrick remembers, suddenly, his own arousal, is shocked back into his own body and the fire burning inside him. He moans and ruts against David’s thigh, hard and desperate, consumed by the feeling.

David breaks their kiss and breathes hotly against his ear. Patrick shivers. 

“What do you need, honey?” he asks. “What do you want?”

Patrick doesn’t hesitate; the words flow out of him easily. “I want your gorgeous mouth. I want you to suck me. Take me all the way down and let me feel your throat.”

“Fuck,” David says, pupils wide. 

“I want to be so deep inside you, David. Will you let me? Will you let me in deep?” David’s done it for him a few times before, and it was always shockingly intimate, the sensation of being held inside David’s throat. Patrick wants that, wants to be held inside.

David’s nodding, running his hands over Patrick’s thighs, up to his belly, around to squeeze his ass. “Yeah, baby, you can fuck me like that. I want you to. Fuck. How do you want me? On my knees?”

“Would you―on top of me,” Patrick says. David pushes him down to the bed, then, and looks up at him, smiling, before lying down over his legs and taking Patrick’s cock in his mouth. He goes slow, so slow, and he scratches at Patrick’s thighs and he rubs his thighs against Patrick’s feet, and all of it feels good, all of it, David’s whole body enveloping his. Patrick comes down his throat, held in, held tight, lost and glorious inside the sensation. 

*

“I loved last night,” Patrick says, the next morning, bringing David coffee in bed. David blinks at him, owlish, and then a little morning smile breaks through his befuddlement.

“Me too,” he says. Patrick sits down on the edge of the bed, right next to him.

“I want to rim you again. Did you like it? Was it good?”

David blows on the coffee, sitting up. “Um, I came without anyone touching my dick? So this feels like you fishing for compliments.”

Patrick grins. David narrows his eyes at him, annoyed, then takes a sip of his coffee before sighing.

“You have a lovely mouth, honey,” David says, reaching up to kiss Patrick, bitter and rich.

Patrick doesn’t think they’ve talked like this since the early days of their physical relationship, when they’d both been a lot more anxious about asking for too much. Now it feels easy, and right, like something’s been shaken loose.

“Yeah?” he asks, soft. “What else did you want me to use it for?”

David’s eyes light up; he loves dirty talk, and Patrick knows it, but he’s not always been good at indulging it.

“I think,” David says, tentatively, hand stroking Patrick’s clothed thigh, “I think I want to hear what you want to use it for.”

Patrick closes his eyes, just for a second, grounded by the sensation of David’s soothing hand on his thigh, and then he tells him.

They end up very nearly late for work.

*

The next experiment is when David’s busy one Friday, dealing with some kind of Rose crisis involving his mother’s wigs and his sister’s handbags, and Patrick and Stevie end up getting drinks with each other instead of with David.

They’ve done it a few times before, though it’s been awkward, sometimes, without David there to buffer them. Over text, they’re great at being friends, but Patrick thinks they’re still not practiced enough at doing it in person.

But it’s Friday, and David’s busy, and he wants to do something fun, so he gets drinks at the Wobbly Elm with Stevie. 

It’s nice, they play pool and sip shitty beer, and guys hit on Stevie and buy her drinks, which she shares with Patrick without compunction while stone-cold ignoring the guys who sent them. Patrick gets why David loves her so much. 

“Wanna step out back?” Stevie asks, and Patrick blinks, thinking for an impossible moment that she means they should go make out, but then he makes his eyes focus and sees that she has a joint in her hand.

“Oh. Yeah, okay,” Patrick says, relieved and a little ashamed that the first thought even occurred to him. 

They light up behind the bar, nodding at some other people who are smoking, cigarettes or weed or those little sweet-smelling cigars. It’s the good stuff, still, and Patrick is really high really quickly, after just a few puffs. He shifts from foot to foot in the cold, feeling the dry air like a solid weight against his skin, closing his eyes against the palpable touch of the moonlight.

“C’mon, c’mon, let’s go back in before we fucking freeze to death,” Stevie says, tugging at his sleeve and breaking his concentration.

By comparison to the cold, thick air outside, the inside of the bar feels too warm, too wet, sweaty and strange. There are a lot of people there, Patrick realizes; a lot more than he noticed before. He looks at them, at all their clothes and their haircuts and their bodies, thinking about who they are, who they might be.

“You okay?” Stevie asks, and Patrick nods, but his thoughts are moving fast and he’s not sure if he is. He feels weird, exposed, there in the too-bright light of the bar, with the too-loud sounds of the pool table and the too-sharp smell of spilled beer in the air. Stevie disappears, then, maybe to the bathroom, and Patrick’s alone with all those moving sights and sounds and smells.

He takes a breath, and then another, and he doesn’t like it, and he doesn’t like all these people, these weird loud strange people, all pressing around him and pushing past him while he stands at the bar.

“Get you something else?” the bartender asks, breaking into Patrick’s racing thoughts. The bartender is filling a pint glass; Patrick tries to concentrate on that, on the bright amber liquid, the foam. 

“I―uh, I―no,” Patrick says. Stevie shows up next to him again. Patrick jumps when she touches his elbow. 

She’s holding two shots, and hands one over to him; it takes him a few seconds to understand that he’s supposed to take it from her.

“Courtesy of the asshole in the corner. He wants a threesome with us, if you’re interested.”

“Sounds delightful,” Patrick says, dryly. Normally he would be pleased, would look over at the asshole in the corner just to see a guy who thinks he’s hot and who thinks, from looking at him, that Patrick might be queer, to enjoy that sensation, the idea of it. Normally, he would like it, but right now he doesn’t, doesn’t even want to look, just tosses the shot back and grimaces. “Is bottom-shelf whiskey the best way to butter people up for a threesome?”

“I think he chose it for the alcohol content, not the quality,” Stevie says dangerously, eyeballing the shot glass she just emptied.

Patrick shifts on his stool, trying to get comfortable, trying not to feel antsy. He wants to get up and move. Maybe he would feel better playing pool? But the idea of it, the sounds, the textures, all the people walking around behind him―it makes him feel sick.

He remembers that he’s supposed to be bantering with Stevie. “Well, I’m just gonna say it: let’s not have a threesome with him,” he says. Stevie laughs, then sighs dramatically.

“You’ve ruined my night, Brewer.”

Patrick chuckles, but it’s perfunctory, and he shifts again, grimaces, looks over his shoulder.

“Hey. You okay?” Stevie asks again, slower this time.

Patrick’s stomach does a slow roll. “Uh. Maybe not.”

Stevie nods once, judiciously, and takes him firmly by the hand, dragging him toward the door. He barely has time to grab his coat and scarf.

“Sorry, Frank,” Stevie shouts to the guy in the corner. “Keepin him all to myself tonight.”

Patrick laughs, wonders if David’s going to hear a rumour that Patrick’s cheating on him with Stevie, and laughs again. Outside, he feels better, in the open air with less noise and fewer people, with the press of the cold and the moonlight. There are stars, too, a rich glittering blanket of them. He wishes David were here to see it.

Stevie pulls him to her car, Patrick trundling along behind her, her hand warm on his bare skin. They get in and blast the heater and burrow down into their coats while they wait for the air to warm up.

“Thanks,” Patrick says, blowing out a breath, watching with fascination as it fogs in front of him. Here in the quiet car with Stevie, he feels the rest of that antsy, paranoid feeling draining out of him. 

“No problem. I’m thinking, you maybe aren’t into getting high in loud rooms full of strangers.”

“Maybe not,” Patrick says. By contrast, he feels a little floaty now that he’s out of that room and in the close quarters of Stevie’s car, mind unmoored; he feels good.

“You wanna light it up again?” Stevie asks. She pulls the joint back out of her pocket, the tip black where she stubbed it out before.

“You’re gonna hotbox your car?” 

“I’m not classy,” Stevie says, joint hanging out of her mouth, lighter in hand. 

Patrick laughs, and smokes with her, and they put on music and chill out to it for a while, warm and toasty together in Stevie’s ancient, messy clunker. Patrick’s reminded of parking with the girls he dated in high school or university, how they would get into the backseat together, awkward and deliberate, to make out or have sex.

This, now, with Stevie, feels more intimate than any of those encounters ever did.

“We should go _sledding_,” Patrick says, suddenly, into the lull between songs.

“Fuck yeah,” Stevie agrees. “Adventure!”

“Adventure!” Patrick laughs.

There’s a hill a little ways out from the bar with plenty of snow, not too many trees, and enough glow from the highway and the starlight that they’ll be able to see somewhat. Stevie steals some flattened cardboard boxes from the Elm’s recycling bin, and they throw themselves down into the darkness, screaming and crashing, air rushing around them as they move through the world at incredible speed.

After, covered in dirt and snow, sweating and shivering, when the pot’s mostly worn off and they’re walking back to Stevie’s car, Patrick says, “This was amazing. Thank you for doing that with me.”

“Anytime,” Stevie grins. 

*

Now, when David and Stevie want to watch terrible Space channel giant squid movies, they invite Patrick along, and sometimes Patrick goes, and sometimes he doesn’t. He wants them to have their friend time, one on one, so they can still try to toss peanuts into each others’ mouths and talk about their deepest fears. But sometimes he says yes, and does it with them, the peanuts and the fears and all, and something lightens in his chest when he does. 

Other times, he says yes, but takes them on an adventure instead, and if David and Stevie smirk at Patrick knowingly, amused, while he explains his adventure plans, they also follow where he leads, and it makes Patrick feel smug and confident, powerful, a version of himself that he likes a lot.

When it’s just him and Stevie, it’s always an adventure: stupid, wild shit that Patrick figures he should’ve done in his teens or twenties instead of putting so much of his energy into worrying about meeting other peoples’ expectations. Sometimes he has the idea, and sometimes Stevie does, but it always ends with the two of them laughing, and tired, and contented, and only that once ended with them having broken Stevie’s microwave. Stevie does what she wants, and when he’s with her, Patrick does, too.

When it’s just him and David, it’s slow, sensual, unbelievably hot fucking, and the things Patrick says and does and asks for out loud in those moments become the things he can say and do and ask for out loud all the time. Patrick watches David, unburdened and joyful, as he tastes and touches the world around him with absolute, unmitigated desire, and he learns from it. He learns to glory in the way his body can feel, and in the way his body can make David’s body feel, the two of them lost in it together, eyes open and clear, true words spilling like water from Patrick’s lips. 

*

The night of the final performance of _Cabaret_, Patrick and David and Stevie get high with Twyla and Alexis, back at Patrick’s apartment. Patrick’s worried, at first, that it’ll be like that time at the Elm, or all those times growing up, that the presence of Twyla and Alexis will make him feel paranoid, but it doesn’t; after weeks of rehearsals together under Moira and Jocelyn’s not-so-tender directorial care, he feels close to them, too, safe with them. He watches Alexis puff delicately on a joint and can’t feel anything but warm and fond.

“Patrick,” Alexis enthuses, when they’re all starting to feel it. “You’re going to be my brother-in-law! Oh my god!”

“Yeah,” Patrick says, smiling, because he likes that thought, too. He likes how it feels to think it. Absently, easily, he catches David’s hand and raises it to his mouth, kissing the gold rings one by one.

“When’s your flight out, Alexis?” Twyla asks, falling back in her armchair, curling down into it. She looks cozy. 

“Ugh. Tomorrow. Don’t make me think about it.”

They pass the joint again, and David, sensing some disturbance in the aesthetic, gets up to light the candles and put on some music. It’s something off his phone, something Patrick doesn’t recognize, slow and weird and maybe . . . Norwegian, it’s hard to tell. Patrick feels himself swaying to it, a little, as he sits on the couch and waits for David to come back. When David sits back down, Patrick takes his hand again, digging his thumbs into his palm, massaging his arm, letting his energy dissipate into this service for David’s body. David, now and again, turns to kiss his temple, or the top of his head, in thanks.

They talk about the show, about Ronnie’s most hilarious ad-libs, about Alexis falling that one time during “Don’t Tell Mama,” about Stevie’s plans to audition again next year.

“We should do _Chicago_,” Stevie says. “I want to be a sexy murderer.”

“You sure you don’t want to do _Oklahoma_ and be a farmgirl?” Patrick asks, innocently, and she stares daggers at him while he snickers. 

“Sexy murderer, I vote for that,” Twyla agrees. 

“David, you should join us next year,” Alexis teases. Then, confidingly, to the group, she adds, “David used to do tap.”

“If you hand me tap shoes I will strangle you with the laces, Alexis,” David says, calmly. Everyone laughs, and it’s good, it feels good, to have this with these people. 

Later, David’s music and the mood lighting lead them into a quiet, reflective space: Alexis talks about her fears for the Galapagos trip, and Stevie confesses that she’s still kind of heartbroken after Emir, and Patrick, moved by their honesty, tells them all something that he never intended to say, that he was actually terrified about proposing.

“You knew I’d say yes,” David scoffs, playing with Patrick’s fingers. 

“I didn’t know,” Patrick insists, softly. “I guess―I didn’t really know, deep down. That I was wanted.”

David kisses the palm of his hand, gently, accepting this truth from him. 

“You’re wanted here,” David says, looking deeply into Patrick’s eyes. “You’re loved.”

“You are,” Alexis agrees. Stevie nods, and squeezes his shoulder, wordlessly, and curled up in her armchair, Twyla smiles at him.

Patrick smiles back, smiles at all of them, so that he doesn’t cry, and lets himself fall against the back of the couch and against David’s shoulder, here where he belongs.

They sit together in silence for a little while, comfortable, glad. 

Patrick, eventually, breaks into it.

“Let’s make _s’mores_.”

Everyone cheers. It requires a trip to the store and a lot of conflicting internet research, but they do end up making s’mores, as well as a huge mess of Patrick’s kitchen. It’s worth it in the end, the warm chocolate taste on David’s soft lips the most perfect sensation Patrick can imagine. He lingers in the feeling of it for a long time, eyes closed, swaying, wanting it and having it.

**Author's Note:**

> I do not actually recommend or condone going sledding on an unfamiliar hill in the dark in the country while drunk and high. You should probably not do that.


End file.
